Lightbearer
by Lena Carr
Summary: "In that house, evil things hesitated at the fringes of moonshadows."


She pauses in the hallway, listening to the house breath in the hours after darkness 

TITLE: Lightbearer 

AUTHOR: hossgal 

RATING: PG. More for imagery than language. 

CHARACTERS/PAIRING: Dawn. Some Buffy, Willow. Anything else would be telling. 

SPOILERS: Set after some six months after `Afterlife.' Only spoilers are for the obvious in `Bargaining.' 

FEEDBACK: read before homework at tebosgal@msn.com 

DISCLAIMER: Not mine. They can hold their own hand crossing the street. But Joss walks them to school anyway. 

She pauses in the hallway, listening to the house breathe in the hours of darkness. 

She has always done this, Dawn knows. For years. (Dawn knows she has existed for only eighteen months.) Ever since the family came to Sunnydale. (Without her. Before her.) 

But she does so now. In this moment, present and future meld into each other and the past until it is only one time, one place. One hour. 

Witching hour. At the end of the hall, the grandfather clock ticks outside the room that was her mother's and was Tara and Willow's and now is Willow's alone. After Samhain, Tara took an apartment overlooking the campus. It is a single room, and she left Willow in the room beyond the swinging pendulum. 

The room is empty now. Dawn knows this before she comes to the end of the hall. Since Yule, Willow does not stay overnight. When she does, it is with a dark aspect and slumped shoulders and a traitor's guilty slink. Then Tara relents and welcomes the blood witch back to her room and her bed and Willow leaves the master bedroom empty and full of her books and candles and sachets of rough powers. 

Willow had been bright roses and fresh cream this afternoon. That is not how Dawn knows the room at the end of the hall is empty. She is the key - for her open arms and portals, mysteries and homes. This door remains closed. She still knows. 

Dawn knows many things. She knew about her sister before her mother. 

At night the house is not as it is in the day. Silences that would be unnoticed at noon shout for attention thirteen hours later. The winds that pass silent over the sunlit roof gain a voice after dusk. The darkness gives the spectral air fingers to tug at the eaves and tap at the windows. Things familiar during long afternoons are strangers after midnight. 

Dawn knows them all from long acquaintance. She has, after all, always done this. Always. Ever since they came to Sunnydale. 

She was not such a good companion to the old house - to the house before Sunnydale. In L. A. The little house on the exclusive street, with the ivy east wall and the yellow bathroom. In that house, that house filled with her parents' angers and her sister's flighty desperation and a ten year-old's dreams, in that house she had never risen at night to walk the halls and listen at doors. In that house, Dawn and Buffy had shared a single bedroom and a single closet and three hotly contested boxes of winter clothing. They had fought over the open windows and the open closet doors and the shoes spilling over the floor. They had fought over the morning alarm and the radio settings and the R.R. Knudsen novels in the bookcase at the foot of Buffy's bed. 

In that house, the hours of the night were undifferentiated. Darkness moved in an even swell from the gray twilight afterglow to the dull and colorless tones of morning. She had yet been unfamiliar with the distinct taste of compline, witching hour, last call, and matins. The fluid rhythm of the lunar cycle. Night was night, and all the long stretch of it Dawn could turn her head and watch her sister sleep. The old moon would rise late and shine through the open window, laying a pale sheet across the rumpled blanket at the foot of Buffy's bed. Hours later, the moon gone and the room dark, Buffy would lie there still. 

In that house, evil things hesitated at the fringes of moonshadows. 

In this house, Dawn sleeps in her own room. Her dreams are not a child's dreams. 

She had still known before her mother. 

Dawn would rise in the night and walk down the hall. Not touching a single light switch along the way. She thinks of Lucifer, at home in the darkness. Fourteen steps down the hallway to the bathroom door and back. Five steps back. 

Buffy has her own room now. Drunk on the sufficiency of her portion, Dawn had not considered that Buffy would be alone as well. Her own closet and her own shoe rack and six square feet of space for makeup and earrings. Dawn took to spending the afternoons in Buffy's room. She told herself that it was to borrow sweaters. She makes herself wait an hour before she investigates the jewelry boxes. 

Dawn pushes doors open at night with the back of her hand. A finger's touch marks things. Claims them as yours. When Buffy first…became, fingerprints haunted Dawn. Terrified of her sister's enforcer status, she would use a pencil to open Buffy's dresser and jewelry case. 

Spike told her, years later, skin oils left a scent he could follow for days. 

The door to Buffy's room creaked at five inches. Three let a sliver of yellow glow from the streetlamp fall across the headboard and half of the mountain of stuffed animals that roamed Buffy's coverlet. Four brought the line of light to Buffy's face, if she was in bed. Four was enough. 

In the morning, Buffy would say, "You were sleep-walking again. Quit creeping me out in the middle of the night." 

And Dawn would nod and promise. She would not tell of the hunter soft steps that limped past her closed door. She does not speak of the bruises incompletely hid by Clarion Classic Ivory. One morning Dawn found crimson streaks in the bathroom. They do not match Buffy's Coffee & Peach lipstick. They do not match the saffron light of sunrise. 

Dawn knows night things when she sees them. She wiped the streaks away, and threw the bloody cloth in the trash compactor. 

There are nights she will not open the door. On some nights, the silent strides pause outside Dawn's door, and she pretends to lie asleep as the light creeps across the room. The Slayer stands for a long time in the hallway. Dawn tells herself she should open her eyes, but she remembers the moonlight on her sister's face and she wishes for that again. 

There are other nights. 

In the worst time, in the time…After. After. Or the time Before. But Before was not Sunnydale. Spike was not Before. This was After. (And Before.) 

After, she still stopped outside the door. Four inches showed the headboard and golden waves and eyes that did not close. 

Dawn knows those eyes. She sees them often. And after, when the shaking stops and the sweat damp sheets dry, she remembers that it was a nightmare. 

A nightmare. 

After, she goes into the hall and opens the door and the eyes remain. And Dawn closes the door and goes back to bed, where the eyes remain. 

But After has past. Is past. This is a new After - after the Fall and the fall and the end of the worst (first) summer of Dawn's life. This is now. After Willow and Tara disagreed and argued and screamed. After Buffy began her last semester of college. After their father came to visit. He asked Dawn if she wanted to live with him. 

She thought about the hours of darkness in another house and told him no. He had long talks with Buffy, while Willow sat in the corner, reading. After, her father left again, alone. 

After, the light footfalls no longer hesitate outside Dawn's door. 

In the hallway, Dawn pauses. The house has sounds in the darkness that daylight does not own. Sighs and groans and a mixture of murmurs in two voices, one low and one lower. 

She knows the one voice. She has heard that voice - that sound - in dreams, and in the waking after, as it echos from the walls of her bedroom. That voice, or her own, which is so much a match as to make no difference. 

Her voice. Her blood. Summers blood. 

The other voice is less familiar. Dawn knows the other voice, but not in the waking. She listens to it in the hallway, and in the dreams. 

She knows Willow's room is empty. She knows this because she knows her sister's room is not. And she does not open the door. 

Instead she goes on down the hall, for nine more steps. And back for fifteen. In an hour, she could return, and touch the door. Open it until the hinges cry out. 

She is Dawn. She is the key. She opens doors. 

Open the door and let the light wash across the sun-bright glory of her sister's hair and the ice pale body asleep beneath her sister's golden arm. 

She will return before sunrise and open the door. 

In the iron darkness, she will find her sister sleeping, weeping. A sliver of moonlight touches her face, jewelling the tears. They hang on her eyelashes like a string of opals. 

Dawn will stretch out her hand and touch the tears. They collapse and disintegrate under her fingertips. These are not adornments she may borrow and return. Her sister, half sleeping, half alive, will turn to her and draw her close. The sheets will smell of leather and ashes and sex and the lemon-strawberry of Buffy's shampoo. Dawn will close her eyes and rest her head against Buffy's bare shoulder. 

She is Dawn. She is the key. She opens doors in darkness, and lets in light. 

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